yet another blog class assignment… October 20, 2008

“Rathergate”

Ok so it’s clear that the Internet has now become everyone’s reference to everything. But going further than being just a reference point, there is an ever-growing on-line society sharing insights, details and yes, even opinions with the entire world. The great thing about blogs is that they are relatively unlimited, and un-policed. However that is also their shortfall at times.  In fact it is more often that you find some crazy nut venting his ill-educated rage about waiting time at the McDonalds drive-thru, than it is to find someone with real good constructive criticism.

In the case of Dan Rathers and his last days at 60-minutes, it started with and ended with blogging. While putting together the story that would push Bush off the ballot, CBS actually found their primary source – Bill Burkette – via a survey of anti-Bush Web sites.  Also, they later had returned to bloggers, when seeking to find a 1970’s typewriter expert to defend their documents.

Within minutes of the original CBS broadcast, bloggers were online criticizing the documents that were displayed as the proof.  They were pointing out how those kind of documents could be easily forged.  And it was them, the bloggers, that broke that case.  The main horn-tooters were PowerlineBlog.com, RatherBiased.com, and WizBangBlog.com.

Media observers have commented that the “Blogosphere” is replacing mainstream Media when it comes to information.  It’s no longer just a place for opinions, but becoming a strong community.  It seems that blogging has opened up a place that is freer than any free that we have ever experienced.

My doubts are still strong though. It may have something to do with my “stranger-danger” complex though!

Narcissistic Neo-Journalists April 11, 2008

  The future of journalism is quite a broad vision. It’s always exciting looking into the future. Mankind has been obsessed with it for ages. We always want to anticipate what’s to happen to us and around us. But that would completely rob us of the element of surprise; yet another human obsession. This blog itself is already quite futuristic if you ask me. What the hell does anyone really care about the ambiguous things I have to rant about anyways?                 

                          

I think it can go two ways:

 

Those people who are obsessed with hearing their own thoughts, and just want to rant and not listen to what others have to say, will just continue to do so. Given the power, they will surely cause more segregation among our communities, and it will just become one giant “bitch-fest”.

 

Then there are those people who truly appreciate the term community. People who have been raised to respect others around them, and understand that listening to one another is crucial. We live in larger societies than before, and reaching everyone is easily possible with technology. But the various number of opinions and interests means that more specialized groups will emerge.

 

Specializing and innovating can be a good thing or a bad thing. I am not one to say. However I do love creativity. And my greatest hope is that journalism will continue to take on more unique forms. While I support the arts, and I do enjoy entertainment, I think that they should only be a secondary element in journalism. While it is important to capture the audience, it’s more important to inform them. At least that’s what I thought the point of the free press was. Give people the raw information. Make it innovative but without preconceiving it for them. We should treat our audiences as intelligent individuals, and not be so concerned with spoon-feeding them, or dumbing things down for them. If anything, we should expect the audience to become sharper, and we have a role to play in that. 

 

Special interest groups and media convergence will continue to affect the future of journalism. Maybe journalism itself will be broken up into sub-genres that will be completely viewed as autonomous industries. Or, is it fair to say that journalism as a career may become obsolete?

 

Structure is important. We live in a time where our resources and modern technology are making things happen faster and we have easier access to everything. Somehow that makes me feel smaller though, and very confused at times. Our generation was brought up to be as explicit as possible. The generation before us fought hard so that we could have this freedom of expressions, but now it seems like it’s lead to other sorts of restrictions. Like guidelines for example. Even in school; teachers are asking us, “does this exercise work for you? Is my teaching effective?” We already know that technology has had major implications on the way we get our information, and the way that we learn. They say that we are the Internet generation; nothing can limit us. But I think we are given too much confidence. I really can’t say what will happen, and honestly I don’t want to know either.  I am a pessimist however, so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. 

 

 

Human Bandwidth March 27, 2008

    Well justice has struck again. As I often do, I had thought of some old favourite flicks of mine, and went onto my trusted little portal to download them, but what I found instead was that the site’s server was down. Three days later i find this message:

Friends of TorrentSpy,

We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.

The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.

Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users – permanent shutdown.

It was a wild ride,

The TorrentSpy Team

“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.” – Justice William O. Douglas

 

    It’s true, the capacity for information consumption is drastically increasing. People want to be able to absorb more and do more. It is the mentality that the average man or woman lives with today. RSS feeds are a great example of that being put to use in the online world. Even if you haven’t perceived knowledge as power before, curiosity occurs naturally. Our brains are in constant need of stimulation. But people also tend to believe that they are limited in time. “Life is short.” You’ve heard it a million times before. And although our average lifespans continue increasing, it seems that the mad dash to the finish line keeps getting madder. So then what we are left with is the urge to consume more information, along with the fear of running out of time to do it. 

 

What is the human bandwidth? There are several things to be considered:

 

1. Modern science continues to come out with new and more efficient ways to stimulate the brain, and then studies its effects on the physical and psychological development of the brain. The topics being studied in the expanding fields of Neuroscience today are incredible. Interdisciplinary sciences are explored as the worlds in which electrical engineering, computer science, cognitive and neuroscience are all linked. It’s crazy, and absolutely boundless. 

 

2. Our own human conscience. Is our quality of life improving or decreasing? It’s one thing that  our brains may be getting a nice work out, but what about our nerves? People are beginning to come to terms with the fundamental relationship that exists today between humans and electronics. Innovators are trying to make it easier and more comfortable for us to live our lives electronically. Fibretronics for instance incorporate your electronics into your clothes.  What cannot be argued is that interaction with other humans is essential to our survival. Our existence, present, past and future, relies on the forming of relationships. Spending so much time adapting to living in a faster electronic world, affects our ability to form relationships, and to truly embark on them personally. 

 

3. What are we exposed to? How can we filter out the good, and not be affected by the bad? Are we in control of it? Much of the Internet is to many people still unchartered territory. There are so many portals leading to such an abundance of information; true, fabricated, positive, negative, confusing, logical, asinine, everything. We enjoy the freedom to explore seemingly whatever we want online. We are, however also bombarded by aggressive advertisers who want to zero in on our focus. The new market is the human bandwidth, whatever it may be. Politicians, executives, religious activists, revolutionaries. They all want to gain more of it, and with the help of modern science are able to acquire it more efficiently. 

 

It’s all very methodical. Human bandwidth cannot be measured so far, and we do not know the boundaries to it. We continue to be driven by modern marvels and the new things that we can use to quench our curiosity. Modern science is a vast and fascinating field that is only increasing. And there are so many positive advancements being discovered.  But we do need to be aware of the potential dangers. Obviously there is an agenda and we are more limited than we realize. I had boundless access to all sorts of downloads on www.torrentspy.com, and although I was bombarded with side to side porno links and gambling pop-ups, it was easy to find what I was looking for. And although it is not the last site out there, the trend of privatization will surely stunt free access in that form. Somebody out there wants to control what you are exposed to. With more information maybe you can outsmart them. Or maybe once again, it’s just another game in “survival of the fittest”. Can you stay one step ahead of the technology (or the people behind it)?

 

Portals March 27, 2008

The Internet is just that, portals

Selective Information March 25, 2008

“We know there is a vast morass of information out there that our audiences want us to try to make sense of.  The danger consists in trying to leap above it, not by getting more dramatic or salient or verifiable facts, but by analyzing, speculating, predicting, interpreting – by drawing definitive conclusions while the bodies are still warm.”    Paul Knox, The Globe and Mail Knowledge is power. People place much importance in being familiar with their surroundings, and being aware of current events.  Information consumption plays a major role in everyone’s life, as does the sharing of it. There will always be a portal for information as long as there are curious minds. But just as there will be portals, there will also be impediments. Those who are involved in the field of information gathering have to maintain their natural curiosity, as to appeal to the general public. A significant factor however, is that many people have many different areas of interest. When choosing what needs to be told that day, there are several things to consider. What has the most prominence in people’s minds that day? Who is most involved and affected by the information? The scale of the audience. There are so many things to consider when looking at the term “newsworthy”. Unfortunately, at the forefront is always the monetary profit. Writers have to survive, and stories have to sell. Hand in hand with this sad truth goes the political agenda. Propaganda has been strongly woven into our democratic history, and the media’s credibility continues to be just as flawed as the government. More often used these days is the strength of diversion. The rotation and distribution of facts is altered from being completely free to confuse, and emphasize the things that may not give the public all the power that they deserve. The public is progressively trained to retain less of the mistakes made by their so called leaders, and instead consume irrelevant and useless facts. Consider any war. The volume of stories decreases, even as the war continues. People may keep it in the back of their minds, but they are conditioned to grow accustomed to the violence and the tragedy. The human interest levels are toyed with, and people forget, even though they may have wanted to remember. As a writer it is important to be able maintain the human interest level, even when the story has been the same for a long time. A real tragedy should always hit home, just by telling the truth over and over again. Because it is knowledge that gives people the power to change the tragedy that has been occurring over and over again. 

An Ode to Peggy the Librarian March 14, 2008

Thank God for those wonderful anal-retentive folks and their organization obsessions. What would happen to journalists without them? I totally just spent a good chunk of my afternoon class ripping out irrelevant scraps of paper from my little handy notepad. Some of the stuff in there was from over 6 months ago, floating around among current to-do lists. The truth is that when it comes to writing, things can get really random. Ideas come to mind arbitrarily
and it’s hard to keep track of them. So when it comes to research, it is vital that the information we need is easy to locate. Mohawk’s library services and online databases are wonderful tools for research. In this time of super-sonic information consumption it is especially important that we have tools that help us narrow down our search field and emphasize quality in our resources. It is significant that we have a access to trustworthy sources during our studies here.

Pro Smoke Joe March 8, 2008

Well, this is my final assignment for my online journalism class, and I’ve decided to go satire, so here it is, inhalllllllee!

Why Photoshop the Blemish from the Flower February 14, 2008

The simple answer is because you can. Everybody is obsessed with perfection, and technology evolves more and more in order to make that the norm. But really there is no need for it. I personally wouldn’t even have noticed that there were any imperfections on that orchid to begin with. But then again, I believe that when it comes to nature, imperfections are important. Since people are also “from nature”, I would say that imperfections are also important among them. For the sake of diversity, for the sake of beauty, for the sake of personality, distinguishing marks matter. Not to mention, who determines what is perfect anyways? And most importantly, who cares?

As a journalist, I am constantly looking for the truth and actualities. My concern is just to put it out there, not how it’s interpreted. When it comes to pictures in particular, if the truth is that something has flaws, I will not, for the sake of anything, alter it. And if I did a crappy job taking the picture, then that’s also part of the truth, and I shall not hide that. Instead I’ll work on taking better pictures.

As an individual, I seriously see a problem with our society’s infatuation with one unison way of having things. I have a problem with pop-culture, and brainwash media. I find it pretty sad that this is even a topic that we have to discuss. At our age, (early 20s) we should have realized that individuality and diversity are beautiful things. And that blemishes and marks and freckles are all involved in that. It’s healthy to look up to someone else, but the problem is when you want to be that someone else. We just don’t need twenty thousand Angelina look-alikes; just as we don’t need identical orchids. Anyways, I value other people’s flaws and quirks, and I hope that there are others who like mine.

more to empower… January 23, 2008

Warsawpack January 23, 2008

Empowering words and beats are what drive me to act and speak out…